You can't keep a good duck down

Brendan Hogan spent the night of Hurricane Sandy at his home, not far from the Kettle Creek in Brick Township.

"We were just watching the water rise," he recalled.

Eventually, the water rose high enough to flood his garage, but the most valuable object therein was not endangered. That’s the official competition duck boat of the Ocean County College Sailing Team. The 70-year-old wooden craft just floated on the floodwaters.

Tom Beaton assessing the ducks' condition.

The mast was a different matter. He’d stored it outside with a couple of other wooden masts and booms. By morning, they’d all floated away.

"I knew it was pretty much irreplaceable, so I immediately started hunting for it," he said. "I walked the entire community."

One of the places he searched was the nearby Shore Acres Yacht Club. That club had been knocked off its foundation by the waves. All of the sailing equipment stored there had been swept away. But one of his missing booms had actually swept in on the surge.

As for the mast, he found it on the Shore, more than a mile away, at a spot not easily reachable from his house.

"It must have gone into the bay and then came back," he theorized.

However it got there, he was glad to have the mast back. It just wouldn’t do to put a modern metal mast on a classic wooden duck boat — especially when you’re competing in the World Duck Boat Championships on Barnegat Bay.

The championships took place Friday at the Mantoloking Yacht Club, one of the few structures in that town that got through Sandy relatively unscathed — "unscathed" meaning only severely flooded rather than totally destroyed. The town took the worst beating from Sandy of any town on the Shore, and the recovery is only beginning.

The parking spaces in the street outside the club all were taken up by giant construction vehicles. Many of them were in use returning sand to the ocean from a spot in the bay just a few hundred yards north where the sea broke through during Sandy.

On the club grounds, however, all of the ducks were in a row. They were lined up on land for a pre-race inspection by Tom Beaton of the Beaton Boat Yard across the bay, where many of those ducks were hatched. Beaton’s grandfather was a boat builder, one of the last to work in wood.

"He built them all through the ’50s and ’60s," Beaton said. "It was almost therapy for him when he was in his 80s."

By then, fiberglass had taken over. Wood couldn’t compete with the lighter, cheaper and less leak-prone plastic. But the old boats are still preferred by the purists, as proven by the name of one fiberglass duck boat — "Wish I Wood."

The original duck boats were rowboats, used for hunting on the Barnegat Bay in the 1800s. Before long, someone got tired of paddling and stuck a sail on one. By the 20th century, the duck had found a new role as the primary training craft for the sailing clubs that were springing up along the bay.

"Years ago, when we were kids, we all raced those wooden duck boats," recalled Peter

This photo from the poster for the event shows one duck that didn't fare well in Sandy.

Kellogg, a retired investor who organizes the race. "Then the Optimists got popular and most people sort of gave up sailing the duck boats."

An Optimist is one of many small fiberglass boats that is easier to sail and maintain than a wooden craft. In the 1990s, they were crowding out the ducks. Kellogg decided extraordinary measures were necessary to keep the race, which began in 1969, alive.

He got 13 decaying boats from the Beaton yard and gave them out to sailors from as far south as Tuckerton, with offers of prize money for restoration to what is known as "Bristol condition." He backed the offer up with prize money to be awarded to the charity of the winner’s choice.

The restoration requires much caulking of planks and plugging of holes. Even then, the boats leak. Hogan filled his with water before the race to make the wood swell. He’d pump it out just before race time.

As for the actual sailing experience, it’s a challenge, Hogan said, because of the extremely shallow draft needed to navigate the bay waters.

"In any kind of breeze, you’ll see them go over one after the other after the other, just like that," he said, making a sinking motion with his hand.

For that reason, he packs his hull with air bags. So far, he hasn’t needed them. In the 2012 championships, the rear commodore of the Ocean County College Sailing Club took fourth place in the entire world. Of course, that entire world consisted of just 64 boats.

In the aftermath of Sandy, organizers were afraid that number might shrink. But this year, the number of entrants actually grew. Despite Sandy’s best efforts, on Friday 65 boats took to the pond for the World Duck Boat Championship.